Beethoven’s Hair

And speaking of wonderful books on music, let me tell you about one more, which relates so well to our recent Brahms and Beethoven spring. Beethoven’s Hair, by Russell Martin, is fabulous. Now I have to tell you quickly that I am not a reader of composer biographies. I’ve read Bach’s, and this year Brahms’s, and that’s about it. I can’t think of anything drier than reading a composer’s bio instead of listening to his music.

But Beethoven’s Hair reads like a novel. Martin has two stories going side by side, alternating chapters. One is Beethoven’s bio, told not like a musicologist to get in every possible detail, but told to give us a sense of who this odd, crazy, irascible genius was. There’s only as much detail as we need, and we get a real sense of him and of his music.

The second is the story of a lock of the composer’s hair, cut shortly after he died as a keepsake by a musician who mourned Beethoven. This part is a detective story. The lock of hair made its way around the world. It escaped Germany during WWII with Jews hiding in Denmark. It (the lock) was supposed to go from Gilleje, Denmark, to Sweden, but it missed the boat, literally.

Eventually it wound up in California at the The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, donated by someone named Che Guevara (I kid you not). This lock was used recently to ascertain that Beethoven died of lead poisoning, and it as probably this early exposure to lead that led to his deafness.

Now how can you not like a book like this? Although I have to say I hate that Beethoven had so much hair. (Ahem.)

Check out this site for more – and better – info than this: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/beethoven/hair/hair.html